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Just in time for Halloween, Granta, the London-based quarterly, calls on the American master of horror, Stephen King, to headline a new issue devoted to horror that's more literary than gory, yet still chilling and at times, bloody. -- USA Today

Looking for something a little more cerebral this Halloween than underwear models with fangs? You can’t do better than the new issue of Granta: Horror. The 117th volume of the British literary journal offers a bone-chilling selection of fiction and nonfiction.
-- The Washington Post

OVERVIEW: First and only appearance of Stephen King's THE DUNE in this all-horror issue from Granta publication.

OVERVIEW: It haunts us; it stalks us; it shapes defining moments in our past. It creeps into our dreams and, if we allow it, can plague our ponderings of the future. The same scenarios that draw us to the thrill of the movie theater can rob us of the ability to flee from harm's way. The same 'monsters' that lived under our childhood beds can reappear, alive and toothsome, in our adult lives. And perhaps most frightening of all: without reason or apology, one person's fancy is another person's torment. Granta 117 takes a stab at understanding the phenomenon that is horror.

With award-winning reportage, memoir and fiction, Granta has illuminated the most complex issues of modern life through the refractory light of literature. In Rajesh Parameswaran's short story, a tiger escapes from the zoo and narrates its adventures as it terrorizes a neighbourhood. Daniel Alarcon explores the phenomenon of staged blood baths. Mark Doty ruminates on a close encounter between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. There's also new fiction by Alice Munro, Joy Williams, Julie Otsuka, and Don DeLillo.
Come along. Hold tight. Get scared...

= CONTENTS =

DANIEL ALARCÓN – The Ground Floor An auditorium of screaming fans. Costumed fighters spouting rage at one another as
they prepare for battle. And then the battle itself: raw, savage, bloody . . . and fake. Alarcón investigates the phenomenon of Los Angeles’s Foam Weapon League. With his feet sticking to the muck on the floor, the author speaks with Rossi the Regulator, observes The Squid, The Cavewoman and The Angry Monk, and wonders: Is it camp because it’s staged, or does that make it even scarier?

PAUL AUSTER – Your Birthday Has Come and Gone In this brutally introspective excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Auster revisits the
overlap of his and his mother’s life. Beginning with her death and then reaching backward, via whiskey, caffeine, and a crippling panic attack, he sees her for the woman she was: his greatest source of confidence, far from perfect, widowed three times, plagued in her later years by phobias. A survivor – until she no longer could be one.

TOM BAMFORTH – The Mission As part of a UN envoy, Bamforth ventured into the Darfur desert and confronted the complexities of the region’s ethnic conflict. He collected information, recorded recent attacks, spoke with survivors. As he retraces his steps and recounts what he saw, he observes how the notes he took on the field become more coded and fraught with
abbreviations in proportion to the escalating horrors.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO – The Colonel’s Son Galvanized by ‘pure B-grade schlock’, Bolaño’s narrator relates an imagined experience with the revolutionary atmosphere of a low-budget zombie flick. Rendered
in his signature, steamroller style, he recounts the reckless adventures of Colonel Reynolds, his son and the girl he loves as they make their way through a treacherous landscape laced with bullets and monsters.

DON DELILLO – The Starveling DeLillo’s main character is a squat, spent man who has stepped out of his own existence and lives only in the movie houses of Manhattan. Not even his film notebooks have survived the eschewment of who he once was. Little more than a ghost in the raucous city, he becomes obsessed by a woman who shares his passion, and he begins to follow her: from theatre to theatre, film to film, until at last they
confront each other in the chilling confessional of a ladies’ washroom.

MARK DOTY – Insatiable Bram Stoker was so inspired by Walt Whitman and his appetite for beauty that he invented the character Dracula. With this little-known fact as a jumping-off point, Doty’s bold, intensely personal essay examines the nature of desire and addiction, the notion of insatiability, and how, in his attempts to define himself, he must unname the known in his life and embrace his own inability to be sated.

SARAH HALL – She Murdered Mortal He A young couple goes on holiday in a remote beach town. An awkward conversation leads to an argument; the argument leads to a possible break-up. Rattled and bewildered, the young woman storms off into the night, wondering what’s gone wrong – until a milky white shape appears in the distance behind her and comes loping forward. A quiet, chilling tale of the unexpected, Hall’s ‘She Murdered Mortal He’ will make you think twice about your next late-night walk alone.

STEPHEN KING – The Dune. ‘An old man’s body is nothing but a sack filled with aches and indignities.’ So muses King’s 90-year-old retired Judge as he gently paddles his canoe out to the dune he’s been visiting since childhood. But for as feeble as he may be, the Judge has a dark, empowering secret, one he’s about to share with the world for the first – and quite possibly the last – time.

KANITTA MEECHUBOT – A Garden of Illuminating Existence In a series of collages steeped in devotion and disease, along with her accompanying
text, debut artist Meechubot examines her grandmother’s illness and death, and the pain that reached out from her and grew like roots into her husband.

JULIE OTSUKA – Diem Perdidi As a mother’s memory slowly dissolves into near-nothingness, her daughter enumerates on what has been forgotten and what little remains. Otsuka creates a haunting, fading portrait of the parent-child dynamic in this meditation on the nature of loss.

D.A. POWELL – Quarantine
In ‘Quarantine’, Powell invokes the subterranean quality of disease, the dotting-out of the body one fearful moment at a time, and our tendency to flee rather than confront. RAJESH PARAMESWARAN – The Infamous Bengal Ming Parameswaran takes us into the mind of a Bengal tiger whose affection for his zoo keeper turns into carnage. Escaping from the zoo, Ming wanders into suburbia – and more unintentional slaughter – all the while wanting only to undo the damage he’s caused. ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’ takes us to a place only possible in the realm of stellar fiction.

SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO – Deng’s Dogs
In the 1980s, the Shining Path was perhaps the deadliest of all Latin American guerrilla armies. Without categorically condemning either the state or the rebels, Roncagliolo acknowledges that both have resorted to atrocities. Central to his examination is the charismatic Father Lanssiers, whose life-long commitment to ‘the paradoxical combination of humanitarianism and terrorism’ allows him to understand all with a grace and calm that are as chilling as they are charming. False denunciations; indiscriminate military reprisals; guerrillas posing as citizens, prompting soldiers to fire upon the innocent – it’s all a tragedy to Father Lanssiers,
and none of it can be explained away.

WILL SELF – False Blood
What do you do when informed that your body is producing too much blood? This is the life-changing news Self receives – news that will lead him into an endles series of ghastly treatments and send him back to the one object he has been so glad to be free of for the past twelve years: the needle. ‘False Blood’ is a gripping account of medical horror told by one of our most candid and compelling voices.

JOY WILLIAMS – Brass
In this new short story – as disturbing as it humorous – Williams draws her material from the headlines of a recent tragedy and writes of a mildly disgruntled man, his placid wife, and their peculiar son. We raise our children to become adults capable of thinking for themselves, but at what point is it okay to check out of what’s really going on in their minds? At what consequence? And who’s to blame?

First trade paper back printing, Granta publication. 256 pages. New / New and sealed upon publication for complete protection.